The Left’s Flexible Attitude Toward ‘Rights’

Recently, the Texas legislature passed (and the governor signed) a law with a seemingly modest requirement — that any woman getting an abortion in the state of Texas be allowed (and required) to see a sonogram of the fetus twenty-four hours prior to the surgery.

Note what the law doesn’t do. It doesn’t prevent a woman from getting an abortion. It (at most) slows her down by one day from doing so, should she choose to go through with it.

Contrast this with the hoops that gun owners must often jump through to purchase firearms — background checks, waiting periods, purchase limits within a certain amount of time. Or the requirement that they undergo training, spending money and investing time, to get a permit to carry their weapons, even in states where it is allowed. All of these are far more onerous than the simple requirement that a woman have an ultrasound picture taken of her womb, and see it.

Let us compare and contrast the two “rights.” One of them is enshrined in the Constitution, in black-letter law, in the Bill of Rights (the very second one, in fact). The other is a penumbra of a dubious emanation.

Supporters of the “wispy penumbra” don’t believe that there should be any restrictions on it whatsoever, and express outrage at the slightest perceived encroachment.

Predictably, the “pro-choice” community exploded in outrage and lawsuits against this violation of a “woman’s right to choose” (even though it had no affect whatsoever on her “right to choose”). The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit and managed to get a temporary injunction against it, on the ludicrous basis that they were likely to prevail in court, when in fact their case was laughable. The Texas attorney general quickly filed an appeal to the Fifth Circuit to lift it, and on January 10, the court agreed that they didn’t have a case, and ruled that the injunction be lifted. On January 13, a three-judge panel authorized the state to start enforcing the law. With little apparent sense of irony, the CRR characterized the ruling as “extreme.”

75 Comments, 32 Threads

1.
JeremyR

While some people like to joke about how fun and easy abortions are (Glenn Reynolds at Instanpundit and that T-shirt photo he uses a lot) in reality, it’s a very traumatic experience for most women, something that haunts them for the rest of their lives.

Most of them really don’t to do it, they just aren’t in a position to have a baby (not everyone has a support structure – family, money, insurance, etc).

Jeremy, you write as though you may have been personally involved in an abortion. I was, some thirty years ago, and yes, it was traumatic for me and for my girlfriend.

But why should such a thing NOT be traumatic? Like it or not, hate it a little or a lot, my girlfriend and I terminated the existence of a nascent person for our convenience. THAT is the trauma I took away from the event.

To this day, I wonder who that boy might have been.

The wrong we have allowed to happen in this arena is the wrong of ready, cheap, easy abortions, not the traumatic stigma that most certainly should attach to every such act.

Like you Terry, I went through this many years ago. I agree 100% with everything you say. It is wrong to say “why make it more traumatizing” here because being fully prepared can only help the trauma when it comes. For most intelligent people, the trauma will happen. If you’re not traumatized by an abortion, then you were right to have one because you are not normal.

I think his sentence was meant to be: Most of them don’t WANT to do it.

We are not as bad as Russia (yet) who have more abortions than live births. They (the Russians) are a dying country. They only have a population of 100 million (or did 10 years ago) and their males die young (due mostly to alchoholism or drink related deaths).

Putin, recognizing this, even tried giving cash encentives and “make a baby” days off. Pretty much to no avail. The communist wanted a amoral society that didn’t value life and that’s what they got.

Yeah, the whole “choice” bit is a lie. Every day, women and especially girls are forced to abort by their lovers, abusers, even parents. The pro-abortion crowd turns a blind eye to women not allowed to choose birth, and the clinic workers–as long as someone’s writing them a check, they’re gonna do the procedure.

Jeremy I see the issue more along the lines as a battle to restrict abortion in ways where it does not become trivialized into a fast-food mentality of little consequence. Of course women should have the right to abortions but this should be leavened with ideas about the involvement of the father and to stop using abortion to enable a casual sex life. To me the key word all around is “casual.”

It works like this Mark: if America has a casual approach to abortion legally and morally then more women will choose and be able to abort births. It should be saved for dire need and not because of oops, oh well.

What exactly is traumatic about seeing an ultrasound of a featus? Many pregnant mothers express delight at seeing the ultrasound of their featus, as they get to see their upcoming child forming, and consider it one of the few fun aspects of pregnancy.

The only thing you might consider traumatic is they might, upon seeing the featus, realize that it is not just a “blob of tissue” but something that looks, and even moves, an awfully lot like a cute baby, and thereby might have second thoughts about having the abortion. But doctors routinely disclose information on potential side effects, risks, and possible adverse outcomes, to anybody about to have an operation, sometimes in very graphic and disturbing terms. This is just one more disclosure, and the side effect being disclosed is that the woman might feel guilty after having the abortion if they ever see what a real featus at that stage looks like.

If you say this is laying a guilt trip on women having abortions, I would reply that the possibility of them feeling guilty eventually is inevitable. This procedure just ensures that they will feel any possible guilt BEFORE the abortion, when they still have the possibility of stopping it, and thereby removing any possible guilt, rather than after, when the decision is ireversable. And if they see the ultrasound, and still have no reservations, then more power to them. They are fully informed, and know exactly what they are doing, and have made their decision with knowledge of all relevant side effects, both medical and moral/psychological.

The crazy left is always going to support policies that don’t work and they will rationalize those policies with bogus facts and logic. Abortion is a prime example. The sophistry behind abortion is ” a woman’s right to choose”, and that it is a fundamental Constitutional right, and ignoring of the possibility that life begins at conception. The truth is: Getting pregnant is a choice, getting an abortion is changing that choice. And if life doesn’t begin at conception, it never begins. And the only part of the Constitution that pertains to abortion per se is that part of the preamble which goes “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”.
The crazy left is also wrong about energy policy. It wants windmills and solar panels that produce energy for $1 to $10 per kilowatt hour and it opposes nuclear and coal that produce energy for $.02 to $.06 per kilowatt hour.
The crazy left is crazy.

Actually, Patrick, the crazy left will always support policies which (a) increase government (i.e., their own) power and (b) reduce the population.

Their opposition to- no, make that “hatred of”- civilian gun ownership is rooted in their belief that the power of government must be absolute and unchallengeable. To put it bluntly, they demand the privilege of giving orders which must be obeyed, and killing anybody who even dares to question same.

To ensure this, they hold that government must have an absolute monopoly on force- to be used as and when they desire it, either to ensure the obedience of the masses, or simply to relieve their own inevitable boredom. Sooner or later, even gods suffer ennui, and Chalker’s Law kicks in; “Power is meaningless to its possessor unless it can be used against an inferior, and at the victim’s expense.” This, of course, requires a defenseless inferior.

Leftists not only object to purely recreational use of arms (“Hunters are animal murderers!” “Target shooters are would-be terrorists!”), they do not see self-defense against criminal attack as legitimate, either. To them, criminals are “fellow rebels”, fighting the war against an unjust society in their own way. (They define an “unjust society” as “a society in which we, the enlightened elite’, are not the absolute rulers”.)

This is also why leftists habitually focus on “inequality” and “legitimate grievances” in the criminal justice system; in their minds, a bank robber, mugger, or murderer is simply seeking redress of the wrongs inflicted upon them, i.e. they are a “victim of society”.

To them, violent crime is an instrument of political policy, intended to frighten the populace into giving them ever-increasing power to “combat” it. Said power to be used against, not their “fellow rebels”, but against those who really frighten them; the citizenry.

As for abortion, one of the bedrock beliefs of the modern left is the Paul Ehrlich “Population Bomb” myth, which is also used to justify environmentalist extremism. They believe there are Just Too Damned Many Humans Oppressing Holy Mother Gaia, and they fully intend to reduce the number to just the amount they (the rulers) need to do the scut-work. Abortion allows them to cull the herd while not getting their hands dirty.

So, for that matter, do criminals who kill defenseless victims.

Once you understand the essentially authoritarian, and ultimately apocalyptic, nature of leftist ideology, it all makes sense. They see the terror that crime creates, and the loss of human life that abortion represents. And they find both good.

Both teach the sheep to keep their place. And ensure that the herd never gets bigger than the shepherds want it to be.

Good job eon. Your accurate description of the American Left brings to mind a scene from George Orwell’s 1984.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the priests of power… Power is power over human beings, over the body; but above all over the mind… The real power; the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men. How does one man assert his power over another… by making him suffer… Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing… We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back… Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling; everything will be dead inside you… You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves… The more the party is powerful the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition the tighter the despotism… Always we shall have the heretic at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible; and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing… If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” George Orwell – 1984

I think you give “The Left,” even “The Crazy Left” far too much credit. First, I’ll grant that there is a leadership cadre in the left that is much as you describe, though it would be too rich an amalgam to say that anyone leftist leader held all those ideological positions. Most of those who side with The Left are simply in a perpetual childhood; they rarely think, they feel. The feel that if someone wants to have sex, they should be able to without societal constraints or consequences. They feel sorry for the woman who has had her life inconvenienced by the consequence of her decision to engage in sexual intercourse and feel that she should be able to remove the mass of tissue that is inconvenient to her. They don’t have many nor much like children because children are expensive and inconvenient. They feel like people who commit crimes are either mentally diseased or are agreived by their social or political status and their resort to crime was either the result of something beyond their control or the result of their grievances against society. Consequently criminals should be either rehabilitated from their disease or allowed to be free because their grievances justify their criminal behavior. Most are simply frightened of guns, having little or no familiarity with them, and can’t understand why anyone should have such frightening things. Try to get a definition of an “assault weapon” out of a gun opponent; black and scary is about as close as they can get, and, of course, all of them are “automatic,” though they have no real idea what an automatic weapon is.

In other words, you can sum up the ideology of most of those who support the Left with a three year old’s screech of, “I DON’T LIKE IT!”

My thoughts, exactly, with one little tweak: For leftists, criminals are the result of bad or inadequate social policies, not some sort of criminal urge, and must be ministered to and rehabilitated. How are they going to do that if you blow them away in the back yard?

The beginning assumption of the left – one that informs literally 100% of their positions on social/political issues – is that the public at large is essentially immoral and incompetent, and need to be controlled and restrained by the educated, enlightened elite (i.e., themselves). This is why the Second Amendment is so hated by leftists; they consider armed citizens a horror that must be avoided at all costs.

But oddly enough this leftist assumption of citizen incompetence is also operative in the abortion issue. Though one might mistakenly think the leftist position of abortion-on-demand empowers citizens by leaving the choice to them whether to have one or not, this is in fact not what the abortion issue is all about; the abortion issue is really about the question of who gets to make the rules. Leftists assume the citizens and their elected representives are incompetent to make rules about abortion, and as leftists already “know” the correct moral choice on this issue (modern liberalism being in many respects a kind of God-free quasi-religion), they have removed the perogative to legislate on this subject from the people and those accountable to them and handed it to SCOTUS.

All this tells me is that neither the Republicans nor the democrats are for choice, and for natural rights. If Republicans thing they can force women to purchase sonograms then I don’t see how the can complain about being forced to purchase insurance, ala Obamacare.

And as long as woman retain the sole right to stay pregnant no man should ever be compelled to pay child-support unless he agrees in advance and the taxpayers should not be required to support woman who choose to have kids they can’t afford to provide for.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” Thomas Jefferson

Freedom to kill another person (not in self-defense) is murder; such freedom is the wrongful liberty of tyranny because it violates the unalienable right to life of another person. Wrongful liberty is unobstructed action (murder) according to our will within limits drawn around us by the inferior rights of others (inferior right to life of the one murdered).

My two sons (ages 5 an 6) are both adopted from Texas. We’re just so grateful that their birthmothers chose to have them rather than end their lives. There is still a big waiting list at the agency of potential parents but not enough babies.

It’s interesting to compare the amount of information given to women before abortions, with the amount of information that is REQUIRED to be given before OTHER major medical procedures. And, yes, surgical OR chemical abortion IS a major medical procedure.

If the pro-aborts had their way, there would be even LESS information provided.

I don’t think that feminism’s support of abortion is about racism or eugenics – I think it’s simpler than that.

I believe that pro-abortion groups are made up of feminists who are simply deranged by their rage at the “unfairness” of life that created biologically distinct males and females; made females physically weaker than males; and worst of all, made women biologically dependent on males for care during pregnancy and early child-rearing.

That deep-seated rage at female dependency makes pro-abortion feminists simply hate the idea of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing, and they would happily stamp it out entirely if they could.

Sure, they go after black women first, but that’s probably because they’re poorer and relatively less educated, rather than because they are black.

I’d be very interested to know just how much money the abortion industry rakes up as a result of its protected status under the aggressive interpretations of Roe v. Wade. I would also like to see an investigation of the money trail between the industry and “pro-choice” and “abortion rights” groups, with the result that those groups be properly identified as what they constitute: the abortion lobby.

We constantly hear of the NRA that it is “the gun lobby.” The abortion lobby has somehow managed to avoid scrutiny by convincing everyone it doesn’t exist.

Comparing buying a gun to getting an abortion is pathetic. It would be more analogous comparing getting a drivers license to getting a gun permit.

To all the conservatives saying let’s have less government I have to laugh. You want more rights afforded to heterosexuals than homosexuals and you want women, who conservatives historically have always treated as lesser than men, to have forced pregnancies.

Thankfully the demographics of the party of old white men will be having their last hurrah in the next few years. It will be cornered and stuck in the south where they belong.

“Forced pregnancies” has turned out to be such a laugher line that not even the abortion lobby uses it any more. The rest of the parroted talking points in your comment haven’t aged particularly well, either. Intelligent, informed people know, for example, that old people, white people, and male people are more likely to be pro-abortion than young people, people of color, and females.

Next time you open your mouth, try not to let something quite so stupid come out, OK sport?

Actually the majority of Americans are for legalized abortion thankfully.

As for forced pregnancies being funny – tell that to the teenage girl who was raped by her daddy or someone else and she can’t get an abortion because her parents won’t consent because of their religious beliefs. Or for anyone who gets raped and can’t get an abortion if the social conservative’s get their way.

Tell that to any woman who wants an abortion and the social conservatives say we don’t want her to – that not forcing her to have a baby? Of course once the bay is delivered the conservatives get all upset and say – what more welfare, screw the poor, that was her choice. Even better let’s not even teach birth control as the only true method is abstinence – pathetic

Thankfully most Americans are against legalized abortion, otherwise most pregnancies, instead of 1/3, would end in abortion. As the author indicated, the abortion rate will decrease much more once pregnant girls get a look at the precious little person they are about to kill. Most Americans are rightfully in favor of legalized abortion in cases of rape or incest, or if pregnancy endangers the life of the mother. Most Americans are rightfully in favor of non-abortive birth control – which can be morally justified if human life is established at the moment of uterine implantation.

Conservative opposition to welfare is not pathetic; it is morally justified based on natural law. Non-disabled people on welfare become slave-owners because, through the power of government, they become un-naturally (forcefully) entitled to the fruit of another person’s labor.

“That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race [or class] of men as an apology for enslaving another race [or class], it is the same tyrannical principle.” Abraham Lincoln

Secondly, encouraging unwanted children thru adoption is another option. If we approach the issue from one where we all agree that the life of the child is paramount more solutions can be found. Pls refrain from staw man arguments.

I think what is more pathetic is teaching birth control to children and encouraging them to risky behavior. Stop using the word abstinence as a curse word. Living chastely in single life AND in marriage is possible and should be encouraged by parents.

Homosexuals have the same rights to personal and contractual association as heterosexuals; they just don’t have a right to unnaturally re-define marriage, which is the natural union of one man and one woman.

Women who consent to marriage also naturally give consent to pregnancy – as a means to raise a family. Natural marriage and procreation does not represent “forced pregnancy,” but pregnancy (and family) by consent.

You are not a classic liberal (a modern conservative); you are either a Flaming Fascist or Marxist. Classic liberals do not differentiate human beings based on heritage or skin color (Fascist), or economic class (Marxist).

The statistics on gun ownership–up to 45%, and with record sales–indicate that it is you who are having your last, well, not so much a hurrah as a B.S. tough guy rant from the safety of your computer keyboard. People are becoming more anti-abortion as well. You are a pathetic remnant of the early Nineties, convincing yourself that you are sexy by virtue of the fact that you vomit in fear at the thought that someone else might have the means of their own protection.

Yes, I know. You’re a big man who doesn’t need a gun. You are tough enough that you’ll say anything to anyone—

“Contrast this with the hoops that gun owners must often jump through…”

Actually, the leftists are entirely consistent as both positions are anti-life. Both positions say “the innocent must not be protected from those who might harm them”. Without a gun you’re defenseless, you can’t protect yourself – just like the baby in the womb.

That’s a very interesting connection of the leftist ideological thought process that you made there. It stands well. Hadn’t thought of that parallel in leftist thinking about guns and babies: disarm the victim and empower the aggressor. Very good insight and I think we could take that line of thought even further in examining other aspects of leftist ‘morality’. Good post.

The comparison of gun rights to abortion rights is excellent. Both liberals and conservatives do what they can to abridge rights they disagree with. So, perhaps we can set mutual hypocrisy aside and argue the issues on their merits. Does the right to privacy trump the right to life of a fetus? Does the right to bear arms trump concerns about public safety? These are the useful debates.

BTW, this “right to choose” stuff is a bit disingenuous because to feminists there is a right choice and a wrong choice. Look at how they reacted to Sarah Palin as an example.

I think you miss my point. Whenever a pro-life group succeeds in limiting abortions, the abortion rights groups have a hissy fit. Similarly, gun rights holler when Second Amendment rights are abridged. These arguments are noise. If we set them aside, we can then turn to issues like the one you raised, that there is no right to kill a fetus or that there is no evidence that responsible citizens having guns increases violence (quite the opposite). The argument shouldn’t be about ultrasounds, it should be about these basic premises.

The politically correct Left are already creating laws in some counties where a person can’t smoke a cigarette in their own rented apartment. Yet those same city councils don’t see being in the country illegally as a problem and in fact think illegals shouldn’t even be called illegals but in fact given rights to vote and free money. The Left wants to enhance the rights of illegal foreign nationals while restricting the rights of American citizens.

I don’t see these politicians as traitors so much as too stupid to breed.

Interesting that while (Christian) Texas wants to make viewing ultrasounds MANDATORY in order to decrease abortions, (non-Christian) India and (post-Christian) Canada want to FORBID ultrasounds in order to decrease abortions, of females of course. http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1200302.htm

Feminists might want to reflect on what that means: Christian women, or at least women raised in a Christian society, will value her unborn daughter, if only she sees her. But in a non-Christian society, if the parents see their unborn daughter, they won’t value her; they’ll just see her “defect” (lack of a penis) and the odds that she’ll die skyrocket after her parents (especially the father) see her in an ultrasound.

Simple solution to more restrictions on gun rights. Just mandate, even have a constitutional admendment, that if you have your gun rights take away then you lose your right to vote or hold a professional license (teacher, doctor, lawyer, CPA). After all if we can not trust you to own a gun then we can not trust you to vote, to be our doctors, teach our children, be an officer of the court (lawyer), or even be a governmental worker.

That way it would cost the democrats in areas that they value. If they really want to limit guns then they will target their own voters.

Even the “black-letter” privacy provisions of the US constitution are often violated, and the Supremes often bless such violations because it would make it toooo difficult for the guberment to do what it wants.

But I agree with the premise. The left does have a perverted view of individual rights.

It’s ironic that an article about the Left’s “flexible” (i.e. non-absolute) view of individual rights relies on the “penumbras and emanations” locution which is the unmistakeable telltale of conservatism’s own and similar such “flexibility” (as if Amendments Nine and Ten never existed.)

If you want inflexibility on individual rights — a principled stand in their favor, rather than the “flexibility” of political expediency in the service of causes deemed more important than rights — you have to get off the Ackbar Spectrum entirely.

So the liberal progressives are pro early child termination, anti yours and your family personal safety, anti death penalty and now with the not so fuzzy sections in the Stimulus and Obamacare legislation they are pro late in life adult termination. So if they call conservatives conflicted does that mean liberal progressives are insane? Yep!

Your use of gun rights is problematic in your analogy. See, gun rights are used to be able to defend oneself against criminals and government. Leftism is a very jealous girl, she does not like competition. Supposedly government is there to protect us, if you do not need protection, what is their purpose then?

“JSchultz
With all due respect, if you practice abstinence within marraige, you won’t have to worry about offspring to pass your knowledge down to.”

Good point, thanks for pointing out my poor explanation.
I was not referring to abstinence in marriage (although that can certainly be practiced). I was referring to conjugal chastity as practiced between a man and woman in marriage.

When love is lived out in marriage, it includes and surpasses friendship. Love between a man and woman is achieved when they give themselves totally, each in turn according to their own masculinity and femininity, founding on the marriage covenant that communion of persons where God has willed that human life be conceived, grow and develop.

God’s love is present in their love, and hence that their sexual giving should also be lived out in respect for God and for his plan of love, with fidelity, honour and generosity towards one’s spouse and towards the life which can arise from their act of love.

You are right to point out the left’s hypocrisy regarding the tolerance for burdens placed on gun rights versus abortion rights. However, while you might wish to see abortion more rare or even illegal, if you are going to ask lefties to respect Second Amendment rights you need to be prepared to stand with them when burdens are added to the excercise of their rights. It is clear from your article you don’t believe abortion should have been given the status of a right, but that is its current legal status. Requiring a sonogram before having an abortion is clearly intended to discourage the procedure, even if only by adding cost and inconvenience to the citizen. As you note, this is exacty parallel to requiring gun purchasers to take safety tests or buy gun locks (whose actual use is not required). It is also analogous to the Jim Crow conditions placed on black voters such as poll taxes and “literacy tests”. If a citizen has right, that right should not be made conditional upon meeting some other arbitrary condition. So if you want to argue about making abortion illegal, do it separately from this argument. If you want to argue that abortion isn’t a right, do it separately from this argument. But if you want to enlist the help of lefties in seeing 2nd Amendment rights respected you should acknowledge that they are correct that requiring a sonogram prior to having an abortion is an unconstitutional infringement.

What makes you think we want to “enlist” the help of lefties; all of us with a brain who’ve ever dealt with you know that you cannot be trusted, cannot be dealt with in good faith, and were it not for our basic human decency, the only logical thing would be that we would eliminate you.

The only reservation I would have about this ultrasound requirement is if the procedure was painful or invasive, and not medically necessary. For example, if you had to stick instruments in any unpleasant places to get a good ultrasound, then the patient would have a legit right to not want it, if the only thing they would get out of it is information that is not medically necessary, and they might not be interested in anyway. But if, as you state, the abortion clinic normally does an ultrasound anyway, for medical reasons, then merely requiring the patient to view the results is not invasive at all, and there is no reason at all not to do it.

Abortion – nothing less than the extinguishing of a human life – calls into question a much larger issue, and that is the fundamental issue of the right to life itself. “Progressives” (and the use of scare quotes is intentional) prefer to subsume the value of this individual pre-born life under a cloud of group rights. For to acknowledge the right of the unborn to live is to acknowledge that an individual life has intrinsic value. And that is pure poison to the progressive utopianist meme.

I submit that the horrors of the last 150 years are the direct result of the rise of the will to power and its usurpation of the role that individual conscience, moral restraint and religious sanction used to play in Western human affairs. It is about the desire for the power to control the lives of others down to the smallest details. The great irony is that this interventionist (and ultimately, eliminationist) mindset is precisely what so-called progressives accuse conservatives of harboring. Those who call themselves “progressives” above all desire to wield the power to decide who lives and who dies.

Here is the Vulcan mind-meld translation of the core premise of the utopianist, “progressive” Left: ultimately, you have no right to live. By their lights, you are no more than a thing, an animal, or a machine. Therefore, you have no right to the fruits of your labors. You are a ‘resource’ at best. Or you are in their way and must be eliminated. There’s the last 200 years of leftist philosophy and its practical consequences in a nutshell.

The progressive refusal to acknowledge the value of individual human life over an evanescent conflation of group rights and collectivist ideology is one of the principal reasons why no peace, no accommodation, no compromise can ever be made with them. Theirs is a reckless, willful and fundamentally evil disregard for the most fundamental of all of our rights: and that is the individual’s right to live.

This premise is, has been, and continues to be central to the justification for the wholesale slaughter of millions of human beings – and the enslavement and impoverishment of hundreds of millions more. I have written a modest essay concerning the idea of killers without conscience and the pedigree of their ideas. These ideas are on display in the details of 0bamacare, for example. 0bamacare represents the deliberate and willful devaluation of human life – the reduction of people to mere objects. That is the next step on the way to physician-assisted suicide and, if it is not stopped, government-mandated euthanasia.

And worse. Far, far worse. But that’s precisely the intent of the so-called “Obamacare” legislation.

Why else would modernity’s Left seek to ‘move the goalposts’ that define life? And further, to define the value of individual life by its utility? “Utility” – to whom or for what? We have moved from questioning whether any sane human being should be allowed to make such decisions to dithering over who will get to decide. This is monstrous. And if any of you feel that this is hyperbole or tinfoil hattery, consider the source of such ideas.

Listen to Dr. Peter Singer speaking blithely of extending that ‘right to choose’ to children as old as 28 months! Why? Because Singer argues that at that age, well… they’re not fully conscious and capable of reason! Is this some crackpot who no one takes seriously? Hardly. Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His ideas are universally applauded within academia.

Why else would we hear of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel – Rahm Emanuels brother – also an ‘advisor’ to 0bama, advocating the assessment of the relative ‘quality of life’ under the aegis of his innocuous-sounding “Complete Lives” program? Emanuel’s guidelines are strictly utilitarian, and are based in part upon the notion of an individual’s ‘value to society’.

Emmanuel cites this entry from the Jan. 31, 2009 edition of the British medical journal Lancet:

“When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” This may be justified by public opinion, since “broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants and young adults over very elderly people.”

“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.”

Again, this is an argument for the value of human life based upon its social utility and it is not difficult to trace this view of human life back to its pedigree in early-20th century eugenics. Dr. Emanuel claims further that this system will not be subject to corruption – this fantasy assumes that all men are angels and the millennium has arrived. Systems such as this one, once entrenched, are easily co-opted by fiat and placed in the service of those who wish to arrogate the power of life and death to themselves. Dr. Emanuel offers the following as commentary to the Lancet article:

“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

Some persist in crediting Dr. Emanuel with an unblinking and fearless rationality – that will all play a happy tune for high-minded progressives until they face the real and practical application of his utilitarian praxis. Say, for example, when the government panel – not you or your doctor – decides that your premature newborn infant will receive only painkillers because society has nothing invested in the baby and the calculus of the cost-benefit trade-off indicates that the care required will cost too much and have too uncertain an outcome. Or, when you discover that the treatment for your particular malady is now ‘off the menu’ because it hasn’t met one of the many new Federally-mandated prerequisites for its use and application. A paperwork detail, to be sure. But too late for you. Or, when you find out that the cancer that your mom survived in her sixties is no longer being treated because, after all, it doesn’t serve the common good to spend limited resources on the elderly – excuse me, elderly units as 0bamacase now defiens them – in the last few months of their life, does it? But they’ll doubtless take comfort in the knowledge that those resources will go to “people of worth,” as genocide enthusiast and Obama advisor Audrey Thomason defines them. Won’t they?

So what happens when:
1. Those goalposts defining the beginning and the end of life at last converge?
2. The decision as to who lives and who dies eventually passes from individuals and to the state – as it most surely will if death-worshipping progressives are allowed to have their way?

If that seems a tad, well, extreme to some of you, consider this: there are those who believe that Dr. Emanuel deserves a medal for his fearless and ‘enlightened’ rationality. Dr. Singer’s prescriptions for infanticide without guilt are warmly applauded in the halls of academe.

These ideas have consequences: they pave the road to a nightmare world of slaughter and atrocity – and if you don’t think so, then you haven’t been paying attention to the history of the last century. The nudge, the gradual squeeze – and then the shove into submission and oblivion. This is the foundation and the prerequisite for a world in which neither love, nor mercy, nor hope survive. It is a world where all of your hopes, aspirations and dreams, all of your love of country and family not only count for naught, for those hopes and aspirations – and you – will be extinguished as if you never had existed. Because you surely must be if these will-to-power driven monsters are to rule without fear of opposition.

Pope John Paul II in his 1995 work, The Gospel of Life made this observation:

This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable “culture of death”. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of “conspiracy against life” is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.

There is only one way the monsters who seek to impose such a hellish existence on this world can be stopped.